There has been a rapid growth in the consumption of video on demand (VOD) by households in the United States. This growth has largely been driven by the increased availability of content, especially from broadcast type linear channel offerings from content distributors such as NBC and MTV. Indeed, it has become important enough that Nielsen's audience measurement system, at the behest of broadcast clients, has been adjusted to help capture this viewing as part of an extended broadcast window. In some cases, the broadcast window is extended 3 days beyond the original date of airing (known as “C3”), and in other case, the broadcast window has a 7 day extension (known as “C7”) after the original date of airing.
Though there has been rapid growth in the consumption of VOD files, the processes and mechanisms supporting the creation and distribution of VOD files have not evolved as rapidly. The present day architecture is designed to accommodate the distribution of handfuls of movies to multichannel video programming distributor's (MVPD's) VOD servers, which are responsible for serving VOD content to requesting parties. Further, to allow for time to manage the distribution of VOD files, the VOD files need to be made available to the MVPD's VOD servers well in advance of their air dates. However, the number of movies and their lack of availability prior to their rollout to VOD servers have proven to be problematic for present day VOD architectures.
One prior art approach to address this issue (termed “Start Over” and developed by Time Warner Cable) involves recording broadcast streams locally as they are received and having them almost instantly available on VOD. This approach advantageously avoids (1) a centralized file making process and (2) a subsequent file distribution process. This approach of making the VOD file locally from the broadcast stream helps to overcome the traditional lag in the availability of VOD files after broadcast (losing some of the viewing window for C3/C7 and losing some of the freshness advantage of promotional material run to drive the original broadcast time) and may be done at potentially lower cost because the material does not have to be sent twice to the affiliate (once for broadcast and separately for VOD).
However, as the broadcast audience measurement window has been extended to C3/C7, it has often required a segmented marking for VOD consumption in order to differentiate it from digital video recorder (DVR) or network digital video recorder (nDVR) use cases, which are direct records of the broadcast material and which are segmented by capture of its later time of playback. In order to segment VOD viewing, VOD versioned files may be made or marked centrally, which undesirably delays the distribution of such material to MVPD's VOD servers. Alternately, to segment VOD viewing, VOD versioned files may be made locally by some of the largest MVPDs who can justify the added processing power needed locally to manage watermarking VOD files with a Nielsen watermark.